Playing With Adsense Targeting (Arbi)

[Aequitas]

I'm just setting up an arbi test that I hope will do good and I was playing around with some adsense targeting and I noticed something a bit fucked up and thats adsense puts a shit load of weight on your main URL when targeting your ads.

You see late last night I set up a quick arbi page and didn't buy a URL for it because I had one lying around that I thought I'd use for a quick test to see what kind of ads would be targeted with that page, so the url contained medical in it and the arbi page is about something else.

When I uploaded the page it only shows me those old medical ads, which has nothing to do with this new template, I've included section targeting last night, refreshed the page a wack load of time and did everything I knew how to do when dealing with adsense targeting and it got a bit better but still nothing close.

You see its half assed targeted, it has medical ads (I.E. the main URL), and then it has content ads, for instance lets say the main URL is medicaltreatment.com and my arbi test is about say mountain bike, what its doing is seeing medical in the URL and seeing a bunch of mountain bike keywords in the content so it'll display ads like medical treatment for mountain bikes.

Anyone else ever experiment with how much weight is placed upon the URL for targeting adsense?.....now when I actually do the arbi test it will have its own URL based upon the keywords I'm targeting so after that I should have the ads I want.

Its interesting because thats not a very effective way to pull off ad targeting, say you've got a personal website with a url of mypersonalwebsite.com and you have a page about astronomy or something not related to "my personal website", Google is going to take into account your main url mypersonalwebsite.com and your pages content which is about astronomy and then return ads similar to amateur astronomy, beginner astronomy, personal astronomy and shit like that.

Whats the moral of this story?

When building your arbi pages around certain keywords, do your best to include those certain keywords in your main URL so that your main URL keywords are the same as the keywords on your page, this will then show ads much more targeted towards your targeted keyword, it would really suck if you've found a keywords which pays say $10 bucks per click and you cannot exactly target those ads because your URL is holding more weight then your content is.

 

[illkity]

I've had an awful time trying to setup arbi on different subdomains. For example.

Say I have genericdomain.com. My first campaign is say cars. So I setup cars.genericdomain.com. No problem there. Starts showing car ads in adsense. However say next week I setup book.genericdomain.com. Now I keep getting ads for cars. I've done al the SEO for arbi. got the keyword in the domain and again in the page name. No Dice.

Here is what helps somewhat. Install the adsense preview tool from google. Load up the page in IE. Now open the preview tool. Keep changing countries you may notice some countries show up whit correct ads some not. Now add "?a=1" onto the end of the url. Start switching countries again. Same thing some may be correct some not. Keep doing this for a few minutes and eventually it will work itself out.

You may need to let it sit for a day. I'm solving the problem buy using separate domains and concentrate on building Arbi 2.0 type sites with real content in good niches.

I'll stop rambling now 'cause when I type more that 100 words I don't even make sense to myself anymore.

 

[Aequitas]

No that was a good post, it gets the ideas flowing, some people have said that arbi is slowly dying off, however I don't believe in that, those people just don't know whats going on right now.

I'll downright admit I've barley done any arbi but I'm smart and I've read everything and more and i've done some smaller tests, nothing serious but I always like challenging myself, the point of that is I came across a trend in both arbi and affiliate marketing.

Well Google's QS and dealing with Affiliate marketing gave me the idea that arbi is simply not dying it never will if their is adwords and adsense there will be arbi but its more or less evolving and your old ways need to evolve with it just like everything else.

In a few weeks, after I've done some bigger arbi tests with some new unique ideas I'll be posting what I've learned and found here and elaborate more on what I mean by affiliate marketing and arbi evolving but for now lets make this thread about adsense targeting.

illkity,

Not sure if you've used or read this before but I'm sure you have, do you have the standard section targeting in place on your site? Googles explanation can be found in the help docs here.

 

[illkity]

Yeah, I've used the section tags. The particular site that is giving me the most problems is a WP blog I stripped the theme down to do arbi with. I put in the section tags, using a meta tag plugin, changed the title tags. Google was reporting a problem with robots.txt so I fixed that. I just checked the site today and am getting a server error, nice!

Arbi will always be around in some form or another. Basically, at a high level, if you are paying for traffic and making a profit you are doing arbi. I'm interested in the project you are working on. Sounds like you are doing more than just shitty arbi pages. I've very interested in the Arbi 2.0 stuff that Jon has posted about before. Definitely the direction I'm heading in. Just trying to work it all out.

 

[Aequitas]

I must of missed that Arbi 2.0 shit Jon was talking about but I'm sure it falls along the lines of what I'm dealing with right now, just keep in mind that soon the days of one page arbi sites will be over.

Well not completely Jon's power by numbers idea will still hold true for quiet a long time, there are a few things with Jon's power by numbers idea though, one is initial investment, the other is time to set them up, I'm working on a toned down version, 50 instead of 2000 domains, arbi sites instead of arbi pages, things like that, just thinking outside the box and doing something most people don't want to try.

 

[illkity]

Arbi sites is exactly what I'm talking about.

I have to go back and read Jon's blog posts again. I don't think he gave a ton of details on what he meant by Arbi 2.0. I'm just trying to read between the lines.

 

[NoelKuhl]

if you want better ads for your shitty domain, pass a paramter to the the url as your landing page like

instead of :
ww.djhdsnbch.com

use:
ww.djhdsnbch.com/?cars=ferrari

if you want to target ferraris. you don't need to handle the parameters in teh code, just use them in the url. it will help your targeting.

 

[dekalog6]

Here's my experience and I don't even use the section targeting code. Just dump the pages into a subfolder with a relevant keyword name. Sometimes the ads will initially have problems like targeting my most popular niche ads into a totally unrelated topic page but that usually sorts itself out within a day.
My adwords ads will also display that folder as part of the display url.
I've tested this on multiple domains and so far no problems.